Blue &Yellow: Politics and Economics in Ukraine

 President Viktor Yushchenko was the first top Ukrainian official to comment on the crisis. Speaking on his visit to the United States on September 24, he said he was “convinced that Ukraine will overcome the challenges that our neighbors are facing today.” He said that it was important that the currency crisis and the stock market crisis should not overlap. Yushchenko, who used to head the country’s National Bank (NBU) in the 1990s, said that he had instructed NBU chairman Volodymyr Stelmakh to take steps to prevent the global crisis from affecting the domestic economy, primarily the currency market (Interfax-Ukraine, September 24).

Serhy Teryokhin, a former economy minister, was moderately optimistic, predicting that Ukraine would not be affected as badly as in 1998 because its stock market was “rather narrow.” He also said the NBU, unlike in 1998, had enough reserves to cushion the effect of the global stock market crash. Vasyl Yurchyshyn of the Kyiv-based Razumkov think tank also pointed out that Ukraine’s underdeveloped stock market, which started to fall even before the crisis erupted, did not reflect the situation in the real sector and that there were virtually no investment companies operating in Ukraine (www.for-ua.com, October 1).

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko shared this point of view, saying that the world financial crisis would hardly affect Ukraine, as its stock market “practically doesn’t work,” and “our corporations are not traded on foreign exchanges” (Channel 5, October 1).